Interplay of dialect and descriptive prose

As I read Hurston for this time, as with the short story of hers that we read, the novel’s parallel regional dialect and more formal descriptive prose struck me. It occurred to me that reading these two tones of language alongside each other is like listening to a symphony: first, you might hear the more expressive, upbeat, jolty part of the music, and then it slows to a flowing, more pensive section that somehow seems to explain or contextualize the first. For example, Janie’s utterance to her grandmother that “‘Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think. Ah…'” is very evocative of her sense of mourning in and of itself (24). However, this feeling of mourning and disappointment is enriched by the text that follows shortly after, which I find absolutely transcendent:

“She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind….She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making….She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25).

Janie “knew” all of the above, but she couldn’t say it all to her grandmother; neither would her grandmother want to hear it, nor might Janie be able to communicate this newly acquired wisdom to anyone other than herself. I love the way Hurston lets us into Janie’s conscience here, without necessarily breaking down that divide that still exists for her between her inner self and the characters around her.

From Walter Benjamin’s “Theses On the Concept of History”: Theses V and IX

Question for the Class:

Why do these parables/ideas about the meaning of History relate to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin?

Thesis V:

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

 

Thesis IX:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

 

Coll IMJ,  photo (c) IMJ

Why do these parables/ideas about the meaning of History relate to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin?